I.
During the two centuries that ended with the close of the Peloponnesian war, a single race, weak numerically, and weakened still further by political disunion, simultaneously developed all the highest human faculties to an extent possibly rivalled but certainly not surpassed by the collective efforts of that vastly greater population which now wields the accumulated resources of modern Europe. This race, while maintaining a precarious foothold on the shores of the Mediterranean by repeated prodigies of courage and genius, contributed a new element to civilisation which has been the mainspring of all subsequent progress, but which, as it expanded into wider circles and encountered an increasing resistance from without, unavoidably lost some of the enormous elasticity that characterised its earliest and most concentrated reaction. It was the just boast of the Greek that to Asiatic refinement and Thracian valour he joined a disinterested thirst for knowledge unshared by his neighbours on either side.5 And if a contemporary of Pericles could have foreseen all that would be thought, and said, and done during the next twenty-three centuries of this world’s existence, at no period during that long lapse of ages, not even among the kindred Italian race, could he have found a competitor to contest with Hellas the olive crown of a nobler Olympia, the guerdon due to a unique combination of supreme excellence in every variety of intellectual exercise, in strategy, diplomacy, statesmanship; in mathematical science, architecture, plastic art, and poetry; in the severe fidelity of the historian whose paramount object is to relate facts as they have occurred, and the dexterous windings of the advocate whose interest leads him to evade or to disguise them; in the far-reaching meditations of the lonely thinker grappling with the enigmas of his own soul, and the fervid eloquence by which a multitude on whose decision hang great issues is inspired, directed, or controlled. He would not, it is true, have found any single Greek to pit against the athletes of the Renaissance; there were none who displayed that universal genius so characteristic of the greatest Tuscan artists such as Lionardo and Michael Angelo; nor, to take a much narrower range, did a single Greek writer whose compositions have come down to us excel, or even attempt to excel, in poetry and prose alike. But our imaginary prophet might have observed that such versatility better befitted a sophist like Hippias or an adventurer like Critias than an earnest master of the Pheidian type. He might have quoted Pindar’s sarcasm about highly educated persons who have an infinity of tastes and bring none of them to perfection;6 holding, as Plato did in the next generation, that one man can only do one thing well, he might have added that the heroes of modern art would have done much nobler work had they concentrated their powers on a single task instead of attempting half a dozen and leaving most of them incomplete.
This careful restriction of individual effort to a single province involved no dispersion or incoherence in the results achieved. The highest workers were all animated by a common spirit. Each represented some one aspect of the glory and greatness participated in by all. Nor was the collective consciousness, the uniting sympathy, limited to a single sphere. It rose, by a graduated series, from the city community, through the Dorian or Ionian stock with which they claimed more immediate kinship, to the Panhellenic race, the whole of humanity, and the divine fatherhood of Zeus, until it rested in that all-embracing nature which Pindar knew as the one mother of gods and men.7
We may, perhaps, find some suggestion of this combined distinctness and comprehensiveness in the aspect and configuration of Greece itself; in its manifold varieties of soil, and climate, and scenery, and productions; in the exquisite clearness with which the features of its landscape are defined; and the admirable development of coast-line by which all parts of its territory, while preserving their political independence, were brought into safe and speedy communication with one another. The industrial and commercial habits of the people, necessitating a well-marked division of labour and a regulated distribution of commodities, gave a further impulse in the same direction.
But what afforded the most valuable education in this sense was their system of free government, involving, as it did, the supremacy of an impersonal law, the subdivision of public authority among a number of magistrates, and the assignment to each of certain carefully defined functions which he was forbidden to exceed; together with the living interest felt by each citizen in the welfare of the whole state, and that conception of it as a whole composed of various parts, which is impossible where all the public powers are collected in a single hand.
A people so endowed were the natural creators of philosophy. There came a time when the harmonious universality of the Hellenic genius sought for its counterpart and completion in a theory of the external world. And there came a time, also, when the decay of political interests left a large fund of intellectual energy, accustomed to work under certain conditions, with the desire to realise those conditions in an ideal sphere. Such is the most general significance we can attach to that memorable series of speculations on the nature of things which, beginning in Ionia, was carried by the Greek colonists to Italy and Sicily, whence, after receiving important additions and modifications, the stream of thought flowed back into the old country, where it was directed into an entirely new channel by the practical genius of Athens. Thales and his successors down to Democritus were not exactly what we should call philosophers, in any sense of the word that would include a Locke or a Hume, and exclude a Boyle or a Black; for their speculations never went beyond the confines of the material universe; they did not even suspect the existence of those ethical and dialectical problems which long constituted the sole object of philosophical discussion, and have continued since the time when they were first mooted to be regarded as its most peculiar province. Nor yet can we look on them altogether or chiefly as men of science, for their paramount purpose was to gather up the whole of knowledge under a single principle; and they sought to realise this purpose, not by observation and experiment, but by the power of thought alone. It would, perhaps, be truest to say that from their point of view philosophy and science were still undifferentiated, and that knowledge as a universal synthesis was not yet divorced from special investigations into particular orders of phenomena. Here, as elsewhere, advancing reason tends to reunite studies which have been provisionally separated, and we must look to our own contemporaries—to our Tyndalls and Thomsons, our Helmholtzes and Zöllners—as furnishing the fittest parallel to Anaximander and Empedocles, Leucippus and Diogenes of Apollonia.
It has been the fashion in certain quarters to look down on these early thinkers—to depreciate the value of their speculations because they were thinkers, because, as we have already noticed, they reached their most important conclusions by thinking, the means of truly scientific observation not being within their reach. Nevertheless, they performed services to humanity comparable for value with the legislation of Solon and Cleisthenes, or the victories of Marathon and Salamis; while their creative imagination was not inferior to that of the great lyric and dramatic poets, the great architects and sculptors, whose contemporaries they were. They first taught men to distinguish between the realities of nature and the illusions of sense; they discovered or divined the indestructibility of matter and its atomic constitution; they taught that space is infinite, a conception so far from being self-evident that it transcended the capacity of Aristotle to grasp; they held that the seemingly eternal universe was brought into its present form by the operation of mechanical forces which will also effect its dissolution; confronted by the seeming permanence and solidity of our planet, with the innumerable varieties of life to be found on its surface, they declared that all things had arisen by differentiation8 from a homogeneous attenuated vapour; while one of them went so far as to surmise that man is descended from an aquatic animal. But higher still than these fragmentary glimpses and anticipations of a theory which still awaits confirmation from experience, we must place their central doctrine, that the universe is a cosmos, an ordered whole governed by number and law, not a blind conflict of semi-conscious agents, or a theatre for the arbitrary interference of partial,